Hey again Lightroom Lovers! One thing that a lot of users have written into me about is the idea of outsourcing their image editing. This means taking your images and sending them to someone else to handle the edtiing process. It’s becoming increasingly

Because this is a Lightroom blog, I’m going to encourage you to learn Lightroom and handle your editing in-house. The less that you depend on other people for your success, the greater freedom that you have. Handling your own editing also ensures that you’re going to get it done the way that you want it (assuming that you know how to accomplish it).

But let’s face it. Not everyone has time to learn Lightroom from front to back. If you”re busy building your photography business, and it’s taking you 8 hours to edit a portrait session (or if it feels that way :D) it might be time to explore outsourcing.

Got 1100 photos to edit and no time to do it? It might be time to think about outsourcing.

You see, it’s all about how we can best use our talents. If we’re bad at editing and our time is best spent promoting the business and keeping more clients booking shoots, isn’t it best to focus on that and turn over the editing? Again, I think learning Lightroom is a fantastic idea, but we don’t all live in an ideal situation.

If you decide to outsource, who should you choose? There’s a number of great options out there that accommodate photographer’s needs based on turnaround time, image load, etc. For the last couple of years, I’ve been slowly doing outsourced editing for a handful of photographers, so I can share my views on this.

The best part is that I can return either finished JPEG’s, or a completed LIghtroom catalog for photographers to handle the exports. All of my edits are completed in 72 hours, and I promise satisfaction. For big things like weddings, I have photographers send a hard drive to me, but we also can do digital transfer. I have a lot of clients who reclaimed their lives and grew their photography business by turning over their editing to me.

Have you tried outsourcing your editing? Why and who did you choose? Tell me more about your thoughts in the comments below.

Today, I’m going to reveal my big secret on how I cull quickly in Lightroom with a simple (but largely unknown!) set of keyboard shortcuts.

Okay, quick review here: when we say cull, we’re referring to cutting our images down to the keepers. I always cull my images before I start editing them because there’s no point in editing images we won’t keep right?

Culling is best done in the library module where you have a good view over your images. I also like using Loupe View where only one image is shown, and you can press E on your keyboard to enter Loupe view.

Loupe view is probably the best option for culling, as you can see large previews of your images to help you decide which ones to keep.

Remember talking about flags in our last post? That’s the system we will be using for this example, although other systems work as well.

To get started with our speed trick, go ahead and make sure that caps lock is turned on on your keyboard. This makes the images auto advance – once you apply a flag with the keyboard, Lightroom goes to the next image. As a review of our flagging keyboard shortcuts, you can press “P” to flag an image, or “U” to unflag an image.

I grabbed this screenshot a split second after pressing “P” to flag the first image in the series. With caps lock on, Lightroom advances to the next image as soon as I press “P” to flag the first as a pick.

Caps lock: not just for angry Facebook rants anymore.

When I cull, I can fly through a large set of images with this trick. With caps lock turned on, I press “P” to flag an image as a pick for my keeper images. Pressing “U” marks an image unflagged. With caps lock on, as soon as you press the key, Lightroom automatically goes to the next image.

Give it a try for yourself. With this one keyboard tweak, you’ll fly through the culling phase. No more scrolling through to the next image, you can simply press the appropriate flag button and Lightroom handles the rest. Let me know what you think of my secret to quick culling!

Updated for 2016: check out this video to learn everything you need to know!

Hello again Lightroom fans! Today, I want to tackle how we move and delete our images in Lightroom. Doing these both from within Lightroom helps us avoid catalog issues and errors.

Deleting Photos

There are essentially two types of deletions in Lightroom: deleting the file, and deleting images from the catalog. Today, I’ll help you make sure you know the difference and nail down how to do it.

First thing’s first: to delete images in Lightroom, you first have to select the images! You can select a single image, or multiple. To select multiple images, hold control [cmd on a Mac] – and click as many photos as you want to select. You’ll notice that it highlights multiple photos. We can also select one photo, hold shift, and click another image to select all images in between.

I clicked on the first image, then held shift and clicked on the fourth image to select all of the images in between.

Now, press delete on your keyboard – you can use backspace or the delete button if you have the number pad.

Lightroom will bring up a warning that reads:

Pressing “delete from disk” will delete the images from your hard drive, while “remove” simply takes the image out of the catalog but leaves it on your computer.

Let’s think about the difference here. If we “delete the selected master photo from disk”, that means that we are deleting the file from our hard drive and moving it to the trash bin. Poof, gone. 😀 However, removing it from Lightroom just takes it out of our catalog, but the file is still on the computer.

Clicking “Delete from disk” is going to send the photo to the recycling bin. Clicking “remove” will simply take it out of the Lightroom catalog, but leave it wherever it’s stored on your hard drive. These two deletes are doing different things for sure, but are pretty self explanatory. Make sure and read the menus carefully!

Moving Photos

Another option in Lightroom is to move images. If we need to relocate where our images are stored on the hard drive, we want to do it from within Lightroom so that Lightroom doesn’t lose where our images are stored.

I have to admit that moving photos to another folder in Lightroom is a little clunky, and not as full featured as I would like. However, it can be done from the Library module. On the left side of the program, you’ll see a file browser. You can drag and drop folders into new locations to move the entire folder.

To move folders with images, just drag and drop them using the file browser on the left side of the Library module.

Make sense? Any questions on how to handle deleting and moving photos in Lightroom? Leave a comment if there’s anything I can do to help you out!